His birthday party was awesome, Katie has a couple of pictures up.  Thanks everyone that showed up, he had a great tme.

One of my cousins just turned the new magic number – 13. The age when you become a true Netizen.  At 13 you can signup to forums, and most importantly, Facebook and MySpace.  This is something that my generation didn’t have to look forward to.  By the time Facebook and MySpace took off we were old enough to play, which is why I had no idea how big of a deal it was until I saw a new friend request this morning.  From the excitement of his posts, and the zeal with which he has added friends, I suspect that my cousin is more excited about joining Facebook today, than he will be when he gets his drivers license in a few years.

Now he has a whole new world opened up to him.  A world where geography is irrelevant.  Instant communication around the globe.  How much longer will he be able to stay in touch with his boyhood friends?  His travelling relatives, like me?  He has spent his entire life, understanding on some level, the real importance of a social network (not the electronic kind, the people kind).  Now he can access the tools to help him grow and nurture his network.  There is no reason why he couldn’t have a network of 1,000 friends or more before he reaches college.

What do you think about the consequences for youths without this advantage?

The blogsphere is starting to pickup on Knetwit for class notes.  In the last several days we were featured on both RotorBlog and Listio, two websites specializing in Web 2.0

Listio is one of the first blogs to mention our study group functionality, but didn’t go into much detail.  The study groups are a recent addition, and they are proving to be very popular with our user base.

RotorBlog had a longer article about Knetwit, and went into some detail about our feature set, also including study groups.

Overall this increase in blog traffic is exciting, it’s great to be on the ground floor watching this thing take off!

Edit:  Wait, make that three with Ziipa listing Knetwit as well.  They include a screenshot, but not many words.

The Challenge:
Starting Monday, go a full week only getting news from New Media.
And, blog about it.

Why: you want a better understanding of blogging and new media? Jump in with both feet.

Knetwit was just featured as #2 of the ’10 Newest and Hottest Social Networking’ on ZePy .

There are  some social networking sites which are aimed to teenagers. Knetwit.com allow teens to promote their work, and class notes, as well it can be used as monetize site.

We are moving the Knetwit index to Solr to improve our document search. As we are doing this we are also migrating away from one monolithic storage device to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). In all the planning we began to ask ourselves what else we could leverage Hadoop and Solr for in our organization. For instance RackSpace uses Hadoop/Solr/Lucene to parse their log files: http://blog.racklabs.com/?p=66 .

I plan to document our move to Solr and Hadoop here. I will discuss setting up Hadoop and Solr on Amazon EC2, as well as creating the interfaces which we use to communicate with our Ruby on Rails application.

Just installed WordPress so that I would have my own soapbox.

Andrew in the bath.